On Catching

I’m not sure we read the entire news story before coming up with today’s comic offering, but this wouldn’t be the first time we’d played rough with your Earth facts.

One of the reasons I’ve been so dismissive of your blue-green sphere of late is that I have set my sights upon domination of the cosmos at large. Some of your continents are shapely I suppose. But there are rare minerals such as garbundum, desperately needed for the galactic war machine, that do not naturally occur anywhere on your orb.

Believe me when I say that I could go on like this for hours, but an abiding affection for you has stayed my hand. I don’t know if space as a setting was outré for a while, blasted out France taking the fore, or what, but there are quite a few developers taking on classic gaming themes in that revered expanse.

Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space is the sequel to an older game from Digital Eel, who also brought us the scrumptious Dr. Blob’s Organism and Plasmaworm. Weird Worlds is, and I hope they will not find this summation offensive, a highly streamlined version of the 4x Space Empire type game. The "Action RPG" concept puts stats, advancement, combat, in a wind tunnel and produces a high sucrose version of those concepts. Imagine what would happen if you approached a stodgy old patriarch in the vein of Master of Orion, with the same unsparing eye, and wielding the same dangerous instruments. You’d focus on the thrill of discovering new planets, new worlds, upgrading your ship, only enough trade to maintain the pace, and interstellar combat. Well, that’s Weird Worlds. It’s also designed so that you can actually wrap up a game of it in a single human lifespan. Of course, these liberties are anathema to the steadfast genre proponent - but delicious, freewheeling fun is something that you don’t usually get from that genre.

This paragraph was originally going to chastize them for not having a version of the game available for download, where many people who might want such a thing might pluck it without hesitation. They have done so, so no abuse is necessary. They have made a demo available as well, if you like. I warn you: don’t engage in combat of any kind until you have a pimped out ship with whirling space rims and underglow. Unless you have a deep curiosity about what it would be like to burn alive and then die in the cold places between stars.

There are actually tons more space games, but I’ll cover them later as I’ve already inconvenienced readers with my tardiness. I will admit to you that instead of the word "abuse" in the last paragraph, I had initially wanted to use the word harangue, and that I thought for a very long time how I would imply that I might serve them lemon harangue, which didn’t really go anywhere.